Legendary Quincy producer Al Dotoli still thriving in showbiz

From his household office in Quincy, Al Dotoli has quietly produced shows for everyone from Frank Sinatra to the Grateful Dead. And he’s one of art thief Myles Connor’s best friends.

Lane Lambert

Al Dotoli’s household office may not look like an entertainment nerve center, but it is. In the course of a day, the veteran concert producer is likely to make and take calls for upcoming Gillette Stadium shows, special events from Boston to Los Angeles, and tour-management details for comedian Dane Cook.

The 61-year-old Milton native and longtime Quincy resident glides from one call to the next with the assured air of someone who has dealt with all the details and complications many times before. Which he has.

CLASS ACTS

Legendary producer Al Dotoli sounds off on some of the many famous acts he’s worked with – and how times have changed in showbiz.

LIZA MINNELLI: "She could be so down to earth and classy at the same time.”

SAMMY DAVIS Jr.: “A real presence, and a real person.”

ROCK STARS, THEN AND NOW: “It used to be, no one would ever sleep. They were always partying. A band would get off the bus and ask for booze, broads and drugs. Now they want to know where the golf course is.”

JERRY GARCIA AND THE GRATEFUL DEAD: "Cultish. They ordered food no one else ordered.”

FRANK SINATRA: “Touring with Frank was the Super Bowl. What do you do after you’ve toured with Frank Sinatra?”

Since the late 1960s, Dotoli has supplied the stage equipment, hired the riggers and supervised the light and sound crews for just about every big-name artist or band who has ever come through New England – Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli, Kenny Chesney, the Rolling Stones, even the Dalai Lama.

Dotoli directed the New England Patriots’ Super Bowl celebration parties and did sound and lights for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. In 1972, he ran the sound system for the audition that won Aerosmith their first record contract. A couple of years before that, he was threatened by a Black Panther radical at a Grateful Dead concert.

“There’s no situation you can encounter that he hasn’t dealt with before,” said John Cossette of California, the executive producer for the Grammy Awards and other shows. “Al has always got you covered.”

“There’s only one person we trust to turn to,” New England Patriots vice president Dan Murphy said of the shows and NFL events Dotoli has produced at Gillette Stadium.

Started at age 15

Dotoli has been in the entertainment world one way or the other since he was 15, when he started playing with Myles and the Wild Ones, the band fronted by future art thief and ex-con Myles Connor.

“Playing with Myles was a big deal then,” Dotoli said. “You had a little money, you had the girls. We were having a good time.”

By 1968 – two years after Dotoli graduated from Milton High – Connor had embarked on a life of crime, while Dotoli and former business partner Tommy Walsh started All Sound Audio, the region’s first such concert service.

“I always loved having the best gear,” he said. And when the Grateful Dead and other bands learned the same – that he could set up better equipment than their own – his reputation took off.

“I was a hippie,” Dotoli said, “but I was a capitalist.”

Before long, he was a familiar presence in the Boston music scene, according to Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry and former Sha Na Na singer Lennie Baker of Halifax, among others.

From the early ’70s through the ’80s, “Al was going so fast,” Baker said, doing everything from managing blues singer James Cotton to handling an overseas tour for Dionne Warwick. He toured with Sinatra for a decade.

Meanwhile, he was producing hundreds of New England concerts for powerhouse producer Frank Russo – “everyone who had a radio hit,” Dotoli said, only half joking.

The shows stop

Then, in 1991, “it all stopped.” Russo sold out to a competitor. Sinatra retired, and Dotoli’s father died.

Still restless for action, he reinvented himself as Uncle Al Productions (after Russo’s nickname for him) and concentrated on area shows and special events, like radio station Jam’n 94.5’s annual “Monster Jam.”

He’s spending more time with his wife Rena and their two college-age daughters. (He has two older daughters from an earlier marriage.) And he thought he’d left the concert road for good, until Dane Cook lured him out. Now he’s reluctant to say when he’ll retire.

“When we were all young we said, we won’t be doing this when we’re 50, 60,” he said, “but if somebody asks me to produce the Super Bowl, am I going to say, ‘No, I don’t want to get paid a lot and enjoy myself?’ I don’t think so.”

Lane Lambert may be reached at llambert@ledger.com.

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MYLES CONNOR: Al’s friend, the art thief

For all the stars with whom he has worked, Al Dotoli knows he’s as likely to be asked about his art-thief buddy Myles Connor as he is about Frank Sinatra or Jerry Garcia.

Through Connor’s four decades of criminal exploits, trials and prison time, Dotoli has kept up an affectionate and complicated relationship with the man who introduced him to music as a teenager.

“I never stopped being friends with Myles,” he said, “but our paths split.”

That happened in the late 1960s, when Connor went to jail after a shootout with a Boston cop, and Dotoli launched a long and successful career as a concert producer.

FBI agents followed Dotoli for years in the 1970s, convinced that he was in cahoots with Connor. “If 10 percent of that was true, I’d be a rich man,” Dotoli told them.

He’s still friends with one of the agents who tailed him.

Dotoli said he tried to steer Connor out of crime, and back into music. “but every time, he just couldn’t keep himself from it.”

Ten years after Connor last got out of jail, he’s helping Connor with a possible movie deal based on his life. And he’s doing what he can to promote his new biography, “The Art of the Heist,” which Harper Collins will publish in April.

“We’re still the best of friends,” Dotoli said.

He’s meeting Connor for lunch later this week – “at an undisclosed location,” he quickly adds.